Staying true to their name, local theater troupe Taffety Punk is debuting some exclusive tunes from Dischord vet Ryan Nelson. Nelson, who previously played with Most Secret Method and Beauty Pill, works for Dischord and—according to Taffety Punk's website—provided the ambitious company with unreleased tunes from his bands Soccer Team and Routineers to use in [...]

This week's arts section opens with my demystification of the Grammy Awards and look at D.C.-based nominee Carolyn Malachi. In theater, Chris Klimek reviews a snoozy The Carpetbagger's Children at Ford's and a Taffety's weird-ass Owl Moon; Bob Mondello reviews Tom Stoppard's reverse-engineering of Dolly, On the Razzle; and Trey Graham checks out GALA Hispanic Theatre's [...]

It's been more than a decade since a summer movie season has passed without a big-budget superhero release. Even super-anti-hero comics, like WATCHMEN, the brilliant, downbeat Reagan-era series about how the existence of superheroes would improve exactly nothing, and KICK-ASS, a more recent, less brilliant gloss on similar ideas, have been mined for the movies. [...]

Last night, Taffety Punk Theatre Company performed William Shakespeare and John Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen. The 36 actors on stage—37 if you count the paper bag that played the part of Emilia's Second Woman—began learning their lines about a month ago, but didn't rehearse together until yesterday morning. It was one of Taffety's "Bootleg [...]

Othello doing karaoke. Troubadours singing “Dust in the Wind” as a eulogy. Hamlet descending in a hot air balloon. If this doesn’t sound like your usual Shakespeare, then, well, it wasn't meant to be. Taffety Punk is what happens when a classically trained theater company meets punk rock, and its "Bootleg Shakespeare" productions fall [...]

Ancient Egypt, 1800s Illinois, and modern-day chat rooms are all taking up residence in D.C. theaters. Synetic Theater Company's wordless version of Antony and Cleopatra brings sparks-flying fight sequences and body contortions to the classic tale, at Shakespeare Theatre Company's Lansburgh Theatre through February 28.
If talkier plays are more your style, check out Ford's Theatre's [...]

In late 2007, Chad Clark found himself in the emergency room, convulsing from a fever that had lasted six days. "I was shaking like the characters in Jacob’s Ladder," he says. Clark, leader of the group Beauty Pill, felt like he was dying, he says, and his doctors had no clue how to diagnose him, [...]